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As falde said: biological viruses are not considered living.They are fragments of DNA, usually DNA and protiens- not single cell organisms. Viruses can not supstain life by definition without infection of living cells.

Just for the record also, viruses don't eat anything, they infect. They also don't reproduce, the cell they infect reproduces new infected cells.

Next thing you know people are going to start claiming that there sims are alive.

I have to agree with this one. Code is code. Biology is biology. I have not seen artificial intelligence yet, and computer virii are only as smart as the programmer doing the code. And if anybody is a programmer has seen pretty buggy virus code.

There is a lot of AI software out there. With the technology we have today it is fully possible to build a robot that can do everything an insect can do and even add some properties real insects does not have.

As insects are regarded alive perhaps this robots also should be called alive.

Now I will repeat myself: There are however no definition of what is life and what is not.

With the lack of definition there is no real answer of this topic.

“Next thing you know people are going to start claiming that there sims are alive.”
What arguments do you have supporting that? Remember that most reptiles and insects do act fully on instincts, totally without the ability to learn. Just as most characters in computer games. Worms have so simple nervous system that we can fully simulate them, is the simulation of a worm “brain” less alive than a real worm?

they only follow tasks given by the programmer, ive done robotics and computing, if u give robots sensors, it can only react to certain situations if uve allowed it to do so, if not it just halts the process, and waits for a human, tehy have no capacity to learn or evolve. this include virii, its true that klez evolved to include CIH, but thats only because the worm ran on an infected machine, and to CIH the worm was only another file to infect. its just luck that this happend.
a virus cannot choose its payload, it is told what to do and when to do it when the programmer chooses it to do so.

As said before, there is no universal definition for life, and people question if real world virii are alive, and if they are not then computer virii cannot be alive either...

Personally I wouldn't have a problem with Computer virii being considered "alive", or considered "virutal" life, to reflect the fact that they have very little actual space (though they do occupy a distinct space on a hard drive, so they do have some volume, if small).

If Virii are alive, how would this affect other primitive AI like Eliza or bots (like the Anti Chat bot that has been mistaken for a real person?).... true they are not the equals of you and I, but neither are cats/dogs/rats/frogs/etc., but we still think they are alive and intellegent....

Shouldn't this question be in Cosmos? This is a very philsophical discusion afterall...

- Jimmy Mac

Replicants are like any technology, if there not a hazard, its not my problem....